Humans conversing naturally with machines is a staple of science fiction. Building agents capable of mutually coordinating their states and actions via communication, in conjunction with human agents, would be one of the greatest engineering feats of human history. In addition to the tremendous economic potential of this technology, the ability to converse appears intimately related to the overall goal of AI.

Although dialogue has been an active area within the linguistics and NLP communities for decades, the wave of optimism in the machine learning community has inspired increased interest from researchers, companies, and foundations. The NLP community has enthusiastically embraced and innovated neural information processing systems, resulting in substantial relevant activity published outside of NIPS. The goal of this forum is increased interaction (dialogue!) between these communities at NIPS to accelerate creativity and progress.